 Darrington Press, Critical Role's publishing arm, recently released the Quick Start Guide to Running the Mystery Horror RPG, Candelope's Cura. Candelope's Cura is the first of two planned flagship RPGs Darrington Press is working on, and if this Quick Start Guide is anything to judge their design chops by, lovers of pen and paper RPGs can rest easy. Why? Simple enough. Our experience with Candelope's Cura so far has been excellent fun, our unharmed adventure or assignment that makes up a third of the Quick Start Guide for a group of five players. Each of the five adored their introduction to the world in setting and had a great deal of fun with exploring the first half of the Dress to Kill assignment. As for myself running, this one has been something of a godsend, but I'll get back to that a little later. The Quick Start Guide is split in three. Nine pages or so deal with the mechanical underpinnings of Candelope's Cura, while another nine provide an overview of the setting of this world, a secondary world that is not unlike our own at the beginning of the 20th century. The last seven pages are made up of the game's very first adventure. It's this text that I enjoyed reading most because of the ways in which it supported my role as a storyteller and game master. So you might have to wait a good bit before I get into the specifics of the assignment. Be warned, this post will contain gushing, lots and lots of gushing. Creating a character at this stage is easy enough. Really what we have are five pre-generated characters that present one of the two specialties you can choose between the five character roles in the game. Face, Muscles, Link, Weird and Scholar. The most important parts of this straightforward character creation process is picking a catalyst and a question. The catalyst is the incident that brought the character into the Candelope's Cura Organization, the episode in each character's life that saw them become witnesses to their magic. Yes, with a K at the end, bleeding into the world. Here are a few examples of the player characters came up with, well really, the players came up with four their characters. I phrased out one rather badly, didn't I? Well I'm sure you will forgive me. One of them was the only surviving witness of a deadly magical phenomenon that took place in a naval battle during the last great war to engulf Candelope's Cura's setting of the Fairlands. Another saw his child possessed by bleed, the devious and frightening effect of magic seeping from another place into this world. But as soon as the kid got possessed by it, well, things started going very very wrong. The character was convinced to join the organization when a circle tried to help his family and failed. All the backgrounds engage with the setting to some extent, which speaks to what Darrington Press has managed so far, namely, the narrative designers have succeeded in giving us the first glimpse of a shared world that invites those who play within to engage with the details of the setting. That's something that very few D&D5-y books have done, at least for my group. The setting is universal enough you can tell a variety of horror mysteries within, specific enough that you feel supported by the information in the Quick Starts guide to tell stories with the distinct Candelope's Cura penchant. As enough in these 27 pages to set the imagination ablaze, including a very beautiful map. The second interesting element to customizing these pre-generated character sheets is the question. It asks the players to come up with an overarching purpose, their characters have in their ongoing work for Candelope's Cura, and the cell from which they operate in, which is called a circle. One of the resources in the Quick Start Kit is a circle sheet, which invites the party to name its circle and list its members. The circle sheet also provides some party-wide resources, and even a progression track for your branch of the organization. We called ours Aurora Arcana. I take no credit for that one, as parties are definitely pressed for time and barred at naming things. Coming up with a question opens a doorway to a character's drive and psyche. It's a two-way street. The player benefits from it because they get a prompt urging them to figure out their character's long-term obsession. I benefit from it because I have an additional lever to pull towards my dastardly ends, which involve torturing the player characters to no end, as every devious game master knows to do. There are a few elements more on the character sheet you can use to develop these characters further. One example is a small box that invites you to define your relationship with each of the other players, or rather with each of the other characters. We didn't get to filling that one explicitly as we'd already spent an hour coming up with names, traits, catalysts, questions and just discussing the rules. Not everyone had read the Quick Start Guide to which, well, I'm sure they will be punished. But come to think of it, it might be a great warm-up to session two to ask each player to define their relationship in one or two words, words such as contentious or mentor slash mentee and so forth. Certain relationships have come across already, but at the same time the first session lacked interaction between a few characters, so this will be a nice invitation to have the players do more together, where previously they did not. I won't be explaining the mechanics safe to highlight how intuitive they are. There's something called the Field Guide as part of the Quick Start Handouts, which does an excellent job of giving you the short of it. For the purposes of this conversation, you need to know that this isn't the 20 system, but the 6 one. You'll only have a roll one, two or more D6s, depending on how good you are at one of nine skills, split equally between three attributes, a lot more straightforward than many alternatives. It clicked with both the veterans and the RPG newcomer to my table. None of us have played John Harper's Blades in the Dark, which is a chief inspiration for this game. As the last page of the Quick Start guide mentions with, well, all due considerations. I'm sure I'm not the only game master who'll be looking into Blades in the Dark after getting acquainted with this guide, however. As a narrative-driven game, Kandel Obscure doesn't come with any combat-specific mechanics, which offered a degree of liberty to those of us used to rolling initiative. The extra dice you gain from drives which reflect how invested you are in a particular stat and skills make for a potent resource to manage. I need to read up on the way Resistance's function again, however, I forgot all about those while playing. I did. Just after writing the last sentence, Resistance works a little the way the luck-feet in D&D does, allowing you to re-roll a number of dice equal to the rating of the action used for the previous roll. That last one was a citation. Cool. That explains it clearly enough. My favourite mechanic of the whole thing has to be the one that allows players to pick up my favourite mechanic allows players to pick up to three pieces of gear at any point during an assignment. This gives an excellent amount of flexibility for the party. At the same time, the hard limit – you can choose no more than three pieces of gear in that way – makes certain that no one player more enthusiastic than any others gets to have a solution for each and every problem the party faces. The shown degree of variety comes with the fact that each roll comes with its own gear. As if that wasn't enough, you can also write down a piece of gear outside your list. As long as the Game Master okays it, you get to use that one. I love this taken gear. Absolutely adore it. I wonder if other games have done this before, if indeed Blades in the Dark has something like it. If you know, why don't you let me know in the comments below? Props to this game for taking a stark anti-capitalist stance. You kind of have to. After the myriad ways in which Wizards of the Coast has shat the proverbial bed over the first half of 2023, there's more to say about this and especially about the assignment Dressed to Kill. Plenty more. But considering I've written 1,200 words already, nearly 1,300 at this point, I think I'll share my impressions of Kondale Obscure's first assignment once I've run the rest of it. If you would enjoy that, why don't you stick around for more? I'm sure there's something fun in Whitty to say about Dressed to Kill and plenty of informative stuff as well. So please, like this video, leave your impressions of Kondale Obscure or my take on it in the comments down below and don't forget to subscribe. I appreciate it and thank you to everyone who already has. I'll see you next time. I'm Philip Magnus. Bye.